Toyota: Slowly, Slowly The Colossus Crumbles

For the best part of 25 years, Toyota has dominated the Australian market with a vice-grip on a 20 percent market share.

We’ve commented about it before, and not so long ago.

Others have ebbed and flowed, mostly ebbed in a fragmenting market, but Toyota has stood above it all - the Colossus of Rhodes, imperious and unassailable.

But now it’s beginning to tremble. With each month its grip on the market loosens, and it has a baying pack inching closer.

There is still daylight between its heels and that pack; but the pack is now vastly more diverse.

And Toyota finds it is not only being attacked by traditional rivals, Mazda, Holden (again) and Ford et al, but the slings are also coming from above - from a prestige sector pressing down - and from below, from those pesky and rapidly improving Koreans.